


Like the King of a Rainy Country

by disenchanted



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Drug Abuse, Dysfunctional Relationships, London, M/M, Sibling Incest, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-18
Updated: 2015-03-18
Packaged: 2018-03-18 12:47:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3570227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki and Thor ride again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like the King of a Rainy Country

**Author's Note:**

> I began to write this as a Tumblr snippet, a month and a half ago. Truly it wasn't intended to have taken on these proportions, but apparently something compelled me...

> 'It's the hardest addiction of all,' said Patrick. 'Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.' 
> 
> 'Don't!' said Julia, 'I'm having enough trouble wearing nicotine patches and still smoking at the same time.' 
> 
> —Edward St Aubyn, _At Last_.

 

i. 

As a child, Loki had used scarves and trinkets to translate himself from his and Thor's bedroom to the places he read about in books: the Crystal Palace at the opening of the Great Exhibition, or an Orthodox church during the Siege of Sevastopol. The communal garden tucked behind the house in Kensington, where the grass was muddy and the trees drooped in the shadow of the surrounding buildings, became the secret garden at Misselthwaite Manor. When, at thirteen, he followed Thor to Winchester College, he imagined that it was the Styx that gurgled audibly beneath the pavement. Somehow that notion existed concurrently with his chapel daydreams, in which he played the role of Bloody Mary before her accession, gritting her teeth through Anglican services.

Loki missed, now, the clear, dense brilliance of these fantasies. In his later years at school he had entered into a straightforward, almost proprietary relationship with narcotics, the price of which, beyond the price itself, was the necessity of an extraordinary discipline. Each slight discomfort had to be detected, interpreted, classified and then remedied: irritated isolation could be alchemized into social lubricity by the application of a line or two of cocaine, and a handful of tablets of oxycodone might stir a sudden, obliterating agony into a marginally more bearable mania. By sixth form, the moments Loki thought of as 'unselfing'—the dropping of a foreign landscape over the wallpaper of the ordinary, the blessed blurring of the somatic—were so fragile and rebellious that he had come almost to fear them. But then he feared everything else: waking in his rooms in college, waking in the house in Kensington, becoming slowly aware of the length of his fingers and the taste of his mouth. 

Like any coward, he sought protection in the places where he was most unlikely to encounter what he thought of as his own life. When he could not go away physically—if he was, as he was now, at a country house in Wiltshire, celebrating the twenty-first birthday of an Oxford friend—he excused himself and the boy he was fucking, and locked them up in the lav. There he rifled through his jacket pockets for a mixed handful of bags and went, as best he could, away from himself. The truth was that what in theory seemed simple was in practice damned difficult. Though he plunged through the period of initial incapacity, he could not help but hear the rustle of clothed bodies in motion, the click of leather soles on tile, the tack-tack-tack of the edge of a credit card against a hard surface. 

Nick, the boy, was kneeling in front of the toilet, chopping lines on the cover of a Baedeker's Egypt. 

'You want to do a few lines, too?' he asked, studiedly casual. He was at Oxford on scholarship, having been at a fairly good grammar school in Reading, and had a timid admiration for Loki's drug-taking, which he seemed to think was the function of a physiology unique to the upper classes. Because he saw it as essentially levelling, sex held more appeal to Nick, and as Loki splashed water on his face, he came to stand behind him and put his arms around his waist.

'Fine, absolutely,' Loki said, 'but fuck off for a minute?' Storing his hair clip between his teeth, he let the length of his hair down and then began to put it up again. He had done this so often that he had no need to look in the mirror, a privilege for which he was profoundly grateful. The movement of his hands behind his head did something, too, to push Nick back a step. Through the clip, Loki said, 'Had better go back out, then.'

'You or me?' 

'Oh, ehm'—the clip returned to the hair—'Both of us, yeah? You first; no one notices you. If I go out they'll wait to see who follows.' He knelt to take two of the lines Nick had chopped up. Even that was enough to give him an irreverent glitter, a sort of iridescence laid over the shuddering relief of the oxycodone.

'Darling,' Nick said reproachfully, now kneeling himself, 'I don't really think they're waiting to see who comes out of the loo.'

'Aren't you always complaining about anthropologists who misrepresent cultures about which they in fact know very little?'

'Among other things….'

'Same principle applies. Think of me as the faintly distrustful native guide who despite his perplexing values proves indispensable to the expedition. Of course you aren't giving me wind-up mice and things in exchange for my local knowledge.' Turning to lean back against the counter, curling his fingers around the hard edge of the marble, he said, 'You could suck me off.'

When Nick, who had remained kneeling in front of the toilet, moved to stand and take a step nearer, Loki lifted one leg and pressed the sole of his shoe lightly to the tip of Nick's nose. 

'No point in standing now,' he said.

After Loki had removed his foot, Nick—plainly aware of his ridiculousness, if not of the smear of dirt on his nose—shuffled forward on his knees. It was almost with relief that he reached up to unfasten Loki's trousers. He clutched at the backs of Loki's thighs, pushing up the fabric of his tugged-down trunks, and applied his mouth to Loki's cock with all of the aspirational enthusiasm he must have shown during his Oxford interviews. Loki leant back and saw how the smooth white ceiling seemed to tip back and forth, like the deck of a boat. He thought: maggie and milly and molly and may / went down to the beach(to play one day) … maggie and milly and molly and may / went down to the beach… maggie and milly and molly and milly and maggie and molly and milly and may…. When near to coming, he remembered abruptly the solid slide of Thor's thigh between his legs, the smear of Thor's spit across his mouth.

'Christ,' Loki said, putting his fingers through Nick's curls and tugging, 'I feel like I'm doing charity work: that should be your feeling.'

Though there was no reason why he ought to have been, Nick was startled by his subjection to this sudden indignity, and might even have stood; but Loki was falling resignedly into finish. Gritting his teeth, shuddering, Loki forgave himself. It had happened, it had happened to him: he was entitled to take pleasure in the memory. He did not know if he was entitled to want it again. 

 

* * *

 

In a week Loki was in London. Summer, like a foul perpetual smog, lay close to the ground; sweat seemed to glisten everywhere, on foreheads and facades alike. The weather reminded Loki of schooldays, of the week or two between going down and taking the annual flight to their place on the Riviera. While their father, a barrister, put his cases in order, Thor and Loki would knock about the Kensington house, sometimes taking hampers up to Hyde Park and lying on the grass till the late sunset. There was the feeling of being suspended, of having no future: the inevitable holiday would happen to someone else. In a sense it did.

A storey beneath Loki, an ambulance wailed its way down the winding street, which at this hour was only occasionally occupied. The last train had come and gone; the tube station across the way was shuttered. The faraway glittering disc of the London Eye, always disconcertingly visible when just south of the Thames, seemed like the tracking bruise that appears after one has looked for too long at a bare bulb. Loki was more than a little drunk. Besides wine with dinner and occasionally champagne, and when necessary sherry, brandy, port or sloe gin, he didn't drink, and felt obscurely that he was slumming, condescending to an inferior vice. But the man who had picked him up, a young doctor with a rectangular head and dark thinning hair, was one of those prodigious drinkers who made up in volume what they lacked in panache.

Sex while drunk, Loki had had cause to remember, was nine parts effort and one part sensation. Submerged as it was in weight and skin, the dull pulse of orgasm was inconsequential. He had had more pleasure in putting Rhys (that was his name) over the end of the sofa and beating the backs of his thighs with a wooden ruler. Loki suspected that Rhys kept the item in his flat for that purpose specifically.

A high-pitched beeping emanated from somewhere in the dark sitting room. 'Damn it,' Rhys was hissing, knocking his knees against the coffee table, thumping to the hardwood floor. 'Oh, damn. I'm going to have to go.'

Loki put out his cigarette in the ashtray on the windowsill and crossed to where Rhys was shuffling through the tumult of the coffee table (magazines, newspapers, books, envelopes) in search of his beeper. As Rhys' hand patted a section of the Afghan rug, Loki brought his heel down on his fingers.

'Ow, hi,' Rhys said, 'that's me.'

'You can't go,' Loki said, 'you're drunk.'

'We both are, dear. But you'll be able to sleep it off; there's tea and coffee in the cupboard for when you wake up—there may be some edamame in the refrigerator.'

'Would you really leave me alone here? The furniture's of negligible value, but imagine that I smashed up your records.'

Despite Loki's threats, first to the records and then to the collection of first-edition Beverley Nichols books, Rhys made his way to the bedroom, the bathroom, and at last the dim cramped foyer. Dressed, perfunctorily washed, he regained some of the reticent charm Loki had detected in him when they first met. Loki wondered whether his bottom wasn't sore, and took him by the hips, sliding his palms downward until he elicited a wriggle of discomfort.

'You were on call,' Loki said. 'Why aren't you ashamed of yourself? Have you got past shame? I don't think you have; you're a good boy. It's only that after being so lonely for so long you thought you might never fuck anyone handsome again, and took the chance when you saw it—slavering, they call it… What'd you have done if I'd not picked you up, nursed your whisky till last call?'

Putting his hands on Loki's shoulders, Rhys said, 'I've got enough time to order you a car before I go. Where are you going?'

'I told you where I live this evening. We were walking to the station; we went to yours because it was a straight shot on the Bakerloo line. To go to mine we'd have had to change, and by then we'd have missed the last train.'

'I don't remember,' Rhys said.

'Do you know,' Loki said, sighing, leaning with a thump against the wall of the foyer, 'I can't stop hearing this fucking Cummings poem. Maggie and Milly and Molly and May—went down to the beach to play one day...' 

'Mm, not terrifically subtle. Puts one in mind of those plastic moulds for sand-castles.'

'I was doing Cummings in A-Level English the week I first fucked my brother.'

'Look, I don't really have the time to do this role-play stuff. In the first place, I'm not a psychiatrist...'

'I think I will stay here and sleep it off,' Loki said, jerking into a standing position and setting off down the corridor, towards the sitting room again. 'It'll be your penance, you'll have to worry all day about what I might be up to. Where are your drinks?'

'The cabinet is up against the far wall,' Rhys called out, 'to the left of the balcony.'

Loki couldn't have said when exactly Rhys left. The flat prickled with noise: the fans, the footsteps of someone above, the whirring of the refrigerator, the occasional blur of a car passing below. These sounds seemed smeared into the mire of Loki's drunkenness. He himself clinked glass and bottle, and thumped as he tossed and turned on the floor. Every now and then he heard something that sounded like the shutting of a door, and thought that at last there was Rhys going; but then he heard what might have been the noises of someone moving about in the flat. 

In this way hours passed. Blue light came through the curtains, and the judder of morning lorries began. On hands and knees, Loki searched through Rhys' bedroom until he found his diary, only to be disappointed that half of it was about Wagner. The other half was taken up with his loneliness, which was perhaps an effect of his obsession with the former subject. Loki hadn't been wrong about him; Loki wasn't wrong about people.

 

* * *

 

For instance, Toby Wyndham. In their third year, he and Thor had been two of Trinity's First Eight; the high point of their friendship had been bumping Balliol. Though Thor was subjected increasingly to Odin's restrictions, Wyndham continued to enjoy the favor of the Odinsons, and as a result had developed the manner of a child used to placating each of his divorced parents in turn. In his diary Loki referred to Wyndham as 'Maisie'.

'Who is this?' Wyndham said, when Loki rang him up. His voice had the porridgey sound of someone who was hungover and more than half asleep. 'It's fucking seven or something, if I'd known this wasn't a girl I wouldn't have picked up.'

The day was turning out to be fine. The sun, piercingly white, had just breached the roofs of the buildings on the eastern side of the street. Loki was sitting in the back of a minicab, which was sitting in traffic on the approach to the London Bridge. He covered his right eye with his hand and squinted towards the car on his left side: the driver was a man in a knit cap and sunglasses, the passengers two disaffected young women with the most enormous dark hair.

'Why would you think a girl had rung you,' Loki said. He had become aware of how dirty his own hair was, and anticipated washing once he was back at his flat. 'You ring prostitutes; they don't ring you.'

'Is this Loki Odinson? You sound soused. —Well,' he added belatedly, 'you've rung me.'

'Oh, _are_ you in the business, now.'

'That wasn't what I—'

'I wouldn't fuck you _for_ money. Not in the least because I've had enough of fucking. Last night I buggered a man to hell and back, I think I rather shook him up: he had a thing about being humiliated, he wanted to be beaten with a ruler, something must have happened to him at school. People do have _things_. Thor told me you wouldn't stop trying to get him to tell you what it's like to have a cock in one's mouth. Didn't you think to ask me?'

'Sorry, didn't realize I was on a gay sex line. What am I up to, five pounds now?'

'Yes, well, it's a good thing you're premature; it saves you money. No, I want Thor's mobile number.'

The traffic was easing towards the bridge. Sunlight spread out into the flat airy space above the river; the concrete shone almost pleasingly pale, and the water below glowed greenish. The familiar shapes of the north bank assembled themselves, growing denser and more definite as the cab moved towards them. Loki felt a sudden swerve of nausea and shut his eyes, holding still. 

'I thought you weren't speaking to each other,' Wyndham said.

Loki swallowed thickly, and after feeling the impulse to vomit, regretted it. 'How do you put up with drinking?' he asked. 'How does anyone? When Prenders vomited in Ballard's Jaguar, I thought it must have been a sort of inefficient insult. Now I see it must have been the whisky.'

'Oh, for fuck's sake, shut _up_. I was up when you were a fresher, I remember you going around with a little book of Prohibition cocktails.'

'Wyndham, I want to talk to my brother.'

'By all means!'

'Text me his number, then the line will be free and you can ring him up to tell him I was soused and you're concerned. He'll be grateful, he'll have the time to send someone out to fetch me and drag me back to the Priory.'

'I'm not ringing up your brother,' Wyndham said, 'I'm going back to sleep.'

A flash of light passed through Loki's eyelids. He opened his eyes to see that the cab had just broken out from behind a bus, and for a glorious moment flew unrestrained. Something about being caught up in quick motion relieved Loki. He thought he might reach the north bank soon enough to vomit in the gutter, as opposed to the footpath on the bridge. Held in his lap, face-down, his mobile chimed once; he leant his head back on the seat and watched sunlight pull across the carpeted ceiling of the cab. 

 

* * *

 

'You must think I'm going mad again.' Loki rested against the window of the cab, pressing his mobile between his cheek and the glass. The air-conditioner whirred, and Loki thought of the white noise machines at the entrances of psychiatrists' offices. 'I'm not, I'm not, I feel well, it's only that— I would kill for a cigarette… It's that I don't know why I _should_ be doing what I _am_ , I mean, out of all the lives I could have had. Do you know you can't fucking _smoke_ in cabs, they ought to let you order ones that do allow you. I don't know where mine _are_ , I must have left them at Rhys', they were in that lovely engraved silver case that Martin Trefusis gave me for my birthday the year we were fucking. I'd meant to give it to someone ridiculous only I liked it so much. Rhys seemed like the sort of man who'd return one's cigarette case—he might look me up and _post_ it, and then I won't be able to tell Trefusis I'd given it to some GP in Lambeth who'd a hard-on for Wagner, eugh—it'd've been the most tremendous fun. I couldn't have given it to some oik, Martin would've expected as much. You see I am doing well, I'm thinking of all of these horrific things. Your arse-gaping homosexual ingrate of a brother is in rude health…'

After a silence, during which Loki felt somehow implicated by the dumb hush of Thor's answering service, he said, 'Where are you? Are you with that girl from St Anne's? Are you in the sun, is she wearing cotton dresses and dabbing _Daisy_ on her neck in hopes you'll kiss her there and leave a little love-bite? Will she be very angry that I've rung you? I can see her sitting on the edge of the double bed in the hotel room, touching your shoulder and telling you that she's so awfully sorry about all this but you must give it up, you've your own life; you've prosecco and strawberries and crème fraîche and tickets to an open-air performance of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ ; you've a right to take pleasure. You haven't. You forfeited that when you were nineteen and brought me off as I was lying on a chaise by the pool in Nice, when you licked my come off your fingers and kissed me before swallowing; if you wanted to rub ankles with your girl-for-now beneath a table at Chez Georges, you might have _thought_ , Thor.'

Like a conservatory that has grown, under sunlight, suddenly hot, he had become intolerable; he could not suffer himself, and could not find the way out. He had taken a Vyvanse to keep awake till he reached his flat, and felt now an incredible prejudice against the driver for having driven slowly enough to necessitate such measures. 

'You won't go to Mummy now, will you?' By the tone of his voice Loki made clear that the question was rhetorical. 'You won't go to anyone. You couldn't bear them thinking badly of you. You want them to think of you as the boy who walks hand-in-hand with the St Anne's girl in the cotton dress. But you aren't duplicitous—that's how they tell us apart, I _am_ —you can't help but be who you are. And you know who you are.'

The streets had become obtrusively familiar. Even the stopping and starting, the sliding and turning of the car were recognizable to him as the motions of the way to his flat. He hated this part: the proportions always seemed to have changed minutely, but it was only his eye that had altered. 

There was the time last year, he supposed, when he drove down from Oxford one Saturday to find that the bistro across the street, whose line of outdoor tables had almost always been empty, had become a Pizza Express patronized generally by eurozone tourists who had wandered down the wrong street in search of Harrods. Loki put on a green windbreaker, assumed a Norwegian accent, and subjected a waitress to an interrogation concerning the minute differences between a Fiorentia and a Giardinera pizza. A week later, he encountered the waitress coming off her shift; he was exiting his flat, dressed in herringbone wool and a neatly-knotted scarf, accompanied by a friend with whom he was speaking perfect public school English. That was perhaps the only time he had ever been found out. 

'Don't let me off here,' Loki told the driver. It sounded more like a plea than he would have liked. 'Take me to the Park Grand Kensington, it's five minutes away.'

The driver repeated the address of Loki's flat and asked whether that wasn't the address he had been given.

'It was,' Loki said, 'but I don't want to go there.'

The driver, with a doubtful glance in the rear-view mirror, said, 'Just as you like.'

 

* * *

 

After picking through a box of macarons (he had then told the driver to make a stop along the way), Loki kicked his way out of his clothes and flung himself on top of the suite's double bed. Very near to his face was the bar of white light that had come through the gap in the curtains; over this bright space Loki watched the floaters in his eyes squirm.

It was nearing midday. Almost exactly a week before, Loki remembered, a caravan of cars was creeping down the front walk of the house in Wiltshire, waiting for the guests to topple out onto the portico. In the hall, arms were flung around shoulders, lips were pressed against cheeks, assurances were given that they would do lunch at QV, or else see each other at so-and-so's thing ('And who else will be there, do you know?'). Loki sat on the floor of the lav he had been in with Nick the other night. The lights had changed, the scene had taken on another cast; Loki was pressing the heels of his hands into his eye-sockets and weeping grotesquely, like a wronged man in a Greek tragedy.

Though it was the only method by which he might possibly have relieved himself, the hideousness of it, the humiliation, was unbridgeable. The perception that allowed him to locate weakness in others had showed him, then, a self-portrait replete with the vilest nuances. And someone was knocking at the lavatory door. On the tiled floor, his mobile was buzzing. Loki later learned that George Balfour, who had agreed to drive Loki and Cass Ponsonby back to London, had been idling his Bentley, ordering Cass to go find the missing party. Meanwhile the facts of being, the going down stairs and the sitting in cars, were closing in on Loki. He shut his teeth on his bottom lip and tore away a piece of the flesh, letting out blood. The grief passed. He submitted himself to standing, then to wiping his mouth with a hand towel.

Lifting himself up from the bed, Loki clenched his fists in one of the down-filled pillows and flung it furiously onto the carpet. This was, he realized, a fairly ineffectual revolt against the tyranny of memory. Down floated up, then settled; as Loki's gaze stilled, the largest of his floaters slid down until it dropped out of his vision entirely. There was only the pattern of the carpet, and the recollection of Cass Ponsonby pushing her way into the lavatory and asking if he had done that to himself.

 

* * *

 

ii.

The windows of the upper storeys had been flung out: the scent of cigarettes and roast lamb thinned, and the heat of bodies in rooms drifted into the wider heat of summer dusk. The sedate Soho square on which the club was situated seemed smudged into a general darkness; over the full tree-tops, the last light glowed lavender. Indoors, the rooms were crowded with conspicuously off-kilter furnishings: chartreuse lounge chairs stood with their backs to creaky mock-Heppelwhites, and floor-length velvet curtains obscured Georgian panelling. At a small round table by a window in the dining room, Loki drank a gin fizz and watched Nick, who had been admitted as Loki's guest, suffer through the port he seemed to have felt obligated to take after dinner. 

'Darling'—Loki used the term a touch contemptuously—'put that down and let's have a real drink. We'll go down to the bar, we'll see who's there.'

'Are we expecting anyone I know?' Nick put down his glass, though didn't move to stand: the episode in Wiltshire had cured him of all such impulsive gestures.

'I doubt a top model will happen to drop by, if that's what you mean. Though there's perhaps a forty percent chance of one BBC star or another.'

'Oh, no, I meant—anyone I _know_.'

'Why, are you embarrassed to be seen in present company?'

Waspishly, Nick said, 'I was making conversation. I thought you might not have deigned to do it yourself.' The glance away, however, showed that Nick was well aware of the way in which his place at the table had been secured. It must have been difficult, Loki thought, having one's cruelties constantly undercut. Still, Nick had always made his own choices, he had agreed to Loki's suggestion that they go to his club; if he liked to feel superior he might easily have gone drinking at the White Horse. 

'I can't take the initiative in all things,' Loki said, shrugging. 'It makes me feel head of the nursery.'

Just then Toby Wyndham appeared in the doorway of the dining room. Loki, who liked to face the doorway and see who came in, saw him immediately, and could not get away with doing anything but beckoning him over, though he would rather have outlined Nick's failures more specifically.

'Well,' Loki told Nick, 'here's conversation,' and rose to shake Wyndham's hand. Knowing that Wyndham had recently had a nasty split with the girl in question—there had been a scene at a restaurant in Bruges, news of which hadn't yet reached everyone in London—he said, 'Hello, sit down and have a drink with us, we've just finished. Who are you with? Where is that very pretty girl, ehm, Natalia?'

'No, no,' Wyndham said, rubbing his nose with the back of his hand, 'that's… Oh, probably taking drugs in a suite at Monte Carlo, Sergei looking impatiently on….'

'Mm, I see, terribly sorry. Still, she was a terrific bore, I don't think I ever heard her talk about anything but how little fun she'd been having. There was always something dirty or very slightly inconvenient—of course there always is, but the more one talks about it the more one becomes it. Anyway, Nick, this is Toby Wyndham, he's at Trinity—'

'With your brother, isn't he?' Nick asked.

'Oh yes,' Wyndham began to reply, glancing edgewise at Loki, 'actually, we—'

'—Wyndham, Nick Grant, possibly the very last of Oxford's aesthetic set. Minus the lavender bags, unfortunately. He's at a disadvantage in jacket and tie; he looks like a City boy. I assure you he's much more obliging than that.'

'At least much more interested in Baudelaire,' Nick said.

How-do-you-dos were exchanged, hands were shaken. Though Wyndham had rested his hand on the back of an empty chair, he hadn't yet pulled the chair out. He glanced occasionally over the top of Nick's head, towards the doorway, compelling Nick to look over his shoulder in turn.

'You've finished, you said?' Wyndham asked. 'We were just coming up to have a quick dinner, but on second thought I think we can stand to have a couple more drinks, first—'

'Hear, hear,' Loki said, a little boredly. 'I was just begging Nick to go down to the bar, but I'm afraid I can't tear him away from his port, they've grown very fond of each other.'

'Oh, trouble in paradise?' Like most straight men, Wyndham was always glad of the chance to camp a little. 'Tough luck to be supplanted by a glass of—what is that, tawny? A vodka martini would at least speak well of her taste.'

'If we're talking about spirits,' Nick said, 'I'd really rather have a whisky—'

'Ah!' Wyndham laughed. 'Scotch or Irish?' Without waiting for Nick's response, he said, 'Did you hear that, Odinson, the Viking blood won't do; he wants a bit of the Celtic. Well, come down, there's space at the bar, everyone is out of town—I'm only just dropping in to pick some things up, I've got a flight out of fucking Luton at eight tomorrow. Nick, have we met before?'

As Wyndham shepherded Nick and Loki into the corridor, Loki took the chance to gesture in the opposite direction and make a noise to the effect that he would be joining them in a moment. Nick looked unreasonably glum at having been left out of what he could only assume to be some sort of fun (the possibility of an incipient bodily function seemed not to occur to him), but could hardly brush Wyndham off, so followed him down the staircase which on the ground floor opened up onto the bar. Meanwhile Loki found sanctuary in the dim, well-appointed lavatory.

Despite the nervous euphoria inscribed into the ritual of drug-taking, Loki felt apprehensive at shutting himself up in a stall. As a child he had often left the door unlocked, finding the prospect of being discovered with his trousers down significantly less frightening than that of being inadvertently trapped. Since then a strain of propriety had taken hold. Loki listened as the door creaked open, letting in for a moment a clatter of voices, before shutting on the hush of footsteps shuffling across tile. Then came the ring and rustle of belt and flies being undone, and the patter of a frankly impotent stream of urine; then the zipping-up, the squeak of the tap, the rush of water. After the tap had been turned off, when there ought to have been footsteps and the door opening, there was a pregnant, inhabited silence. Loki thought the man must have been looking at his reflection, and wondered what he saw. Admiration curdled so quickly into dread. There you were: and though the body was handsome, the body nonetheless constituted the being.

The man was gone by the time Loki took his turn at the sink. As Loki washed his hands, he tilted his head and saw how the light and shadow elongated, then flattened, then elongated his face. His nose pulled out, his cheekbones hollowed, until he tipped his chin up and his eyes drew out from beneath the shadow of his brow. There you were: and there you were, and there, and there. The fellow who stumbled in and gave Loki a sidelong glance as he passed towards the urinals must have seen something different also.

 

* * *

 

Downstairs, the first object Loki identified as separate from the miasma of noise and reddish light was Wyndham, sitting on a sort of divan against the far wall and waving Loki over. Nick was seated next to him, hunched over and holding his drink between spread legs, resembling nothing so much as a seasick man who had realized just after embarking on a transatlantic journey that he forgot his dramamine. Opposite the divan, sloping up from the red line of a low chair, Loki discerned the back of a dark jacket, a strip of white collar, both standard for the time and place. The features he identified instinctively as belonging to Thor were the red, peeling neck, the sweep of sun-bleached hair.

'Odinson,' Wyndham said, surrendering himself to the inevitable, 'look, I've found the other one.'

Clearly Thor had been told that Loki was there. He turned in his chair, steadying himself with a hand on the chair's arm; he had a look of practised restraint, a tolerance cultivated in view of an extreme volatility. Something in the line of his mouth showed that he knew what Loki had been doing in the lavatory, but disapproval seemed not to occur to him. The capacity for that particular shade of expression had vanished the night Loki turned their grandfather's Webley on him—or perhaps the morning after, when Loki was cuffed to a bed in the A&E at St Mary's, so thoroughly engaged in telling Thor about the problems posed by Freud's visualisations of melancholia that he failed to notice his wrists rubbing raw.

Memory was a bitch, Loki thought, taking the gin fizz Nick had ordered for him. When he hadn't seen Thor for six months, it was all summer fruits and fumbling on the Riviera; now that Thor was in front of him there seemed to have been nothing but indignity. Yet he couldn't muster up so much as an inward grimace. This, after all, this exorbitant carelessness, was what he got out of the opiates; the episode with the Webley had been during a clean spell.

'Ah good,' he said, 'it's the First Eight's reunion bash. Tell me again about winning blades, I've forgot the salient details and I might need to use it at a party one day.' He dropped into a chair at Thor's three o'clock.

'Oh, it's just us,' Wyndham said. 'We met just today, at a get-together to send off Cass Ponsonby's book. She's done one about backpacking in Croatia, the sort of thing that's like a diary, only more blown-up for an audience than even diaries are. You know, "The handsome German philosophy student who shared a spliff with me in a nightclub in Zagreb, will he ever ring me again, I would ring him only I can't work out country codes…" The party was worse than the book, it was above some shop in Fitzrovia, there were mimosas with about one dash of champagne for every liter of orange juice, and the whole time I couldn't get away from this—' He looked at Thor, drawing him into the companionship of shared embarrassment.

'The historian,' Thor finished, laughing. He took a long sip of his whisky, gathering his strength before he elaborated. 'An art historian? She did explain it to me, and I did mean to listen—well, the thing is I'd just come from brunch with Archie Blair, he had ordered us a round of Negroni flips, so the mimosas didn't put me out so much as they did Wyndham—'

'You were stinking,' Wyndham said. 'You were absolutely stinking.'

'I wouldn't say that. Close to it, but… But the woman, you see, was doing some book on the First World War, for the centenary, and I think she thought we looked, ehm—'

'As if you were going over the top?' Nick supplied.

'Aha-ha, yes, well,' Wyndham said, 'actually, I think she did. That, and handsome enough.' He hazarded a glance at Loki, who scoffed. 'She was one of those "O Jerusalem" types, she kept reminding us that if we'd lived a century previous we'd be on our way to Flanders fields. I said, "How do you know we'd not have been conscientious objectors?" She stopped for a moment, and then she said, "Well, you wouldn't have been, would you?" I felt like I'd just let it slip that Mummy and Daddy are the ones who hide the Easter eggs in the shrubbery.'

'She was right, wasn't she?' Loki said. 'You'd never have been a C.O., you'd have had been pushing paper behind the lines.'

'Meanwhile you would still be at university,' Nick interjected, 'if possibly in Oslo.'

'And you,' Loki returned, 'would have been in the Other Ranks.'

'Oh, no, not necessarily.' Nick was so impeccably cool that the ice in Loki's glass seemed to harden. 'One of my great-great-grandfathers was a captain in the Ox and Bucks.'

Wyndham, nearly in tears, his face screwed up into a haunted-house mask of intense sadistic amusement, gasped, 'Aha-ha-ha, look at you, Odinson, you bloody snob!' He clapped Loki on the back so vigorously that Loki's gin fizz slopped over the rim of the glass.

Fearing further interference with his drink, Loki worked to finish it. As an aside between sips, he said, 'You'd have impressed the "O Jerusalem" woman.'

'What,' Wyndham said, leaning forward to tweak Thor's shoulder and then thinking better of it, 'you won't defend your brother?'

'My brother can fend for himself.' Thor's smile was pulled tight across his face; to an untrained observer it might have seemed that he actually found Wyndham the remotest bit funny. What warmth there was in the smile came from the desire to please, to be good company, which Thor wanted not so much for the sake of order as for his own comfort. He would get in on a joke only until he reached a fever-pitch of guilt, at which point he would do an about-face and beg Loki to for God's sake let people alone, why was he always causing trouble. 'More to the point,' he clarified, 'I don't think he would stand for it.'

'Why would you think that?' Loki set down his glass on the nearest end-table. 'I don't give a damn about my honor. I would adore watching you exert yourself on my behalf. I always do.'

'You have often enough, that's true,' Thor said. The easiness of his physical manner—the legs spread, the hands dangling between the knees, keeping only a tenuous hold on the tumbler—belied his ambivalence, which showed only in the creases around his eyes. 

Loki watched Thor for long enough that he blurred into unfamiliarity. Maintaining the structure of his own perceptions, keeping hold of the ideas that _I am this and he is that and we are here_ , required an effort Loki was unwilling to give. He sat back in his chair and saw as if for the first time how Thor moved: not gracefully, but all in proportion, with the bound strength of someone who had learnt to be aware of his body. Thor looked, Loki thought, like the sort of man who if let loose would brutalize him.

Lighting a cigarette, Loki said, 'I remember when I was in sixth form and you were just up at Oxford. I was on a volunteering trip to the Isle of Wight, we were taking orphans to the seaside. This was just at the end of June—you were desperately revising, I think you'd skipped half your lectures that term, and I cut away and took the train up to London—'

An acquisitive gleam shone in Nick's face. 'That was when you crashed the car, wasn't it?'

'Did I tell you about that? Yes, I ran it up against the wall of a tunnel beneath Wellington Arch. I was sober as a churchman, too, and going about seventy. All the same I got a fistful of glass in the face and slight concussion, and had to stay the night at hospital for observation. Word got round to Thor and he came shooting in, I don't think I'd had all the glass out before he appeared in the doorway, looking like a struck dog. He sat up by my bedside, he told me he'd read anything I liked, so I had him read the Holy Sonnets while he was meant to be looking over statutes. That's what I mean by exertion….'

Loki considered the fact that most of the formative events of his youth had ended with him in hospital, giving Thor hell. Then he put the end of his cigarette out in the ashtray. 'For fuck's sake,' he said, 'you all look so glum, it was the funniest thing that had happened to me since I got Will Parsons sent down.'

'What, did you really?' Wyndham was playful, camping again; he was so distracted by the scent of scandal that he had forgotten the anecdote about the accident. 'I'm surprised I haven't heard anything about it. _Très choquant_...!'

'I don't feel that was funny in the first place,' Thor said. He was tapping his fingers on the tumbler; it was like he was waiting for a train. He must have been waiting for something.

Loki asked him, 'Why don't you? _You_ never took advantage of a younger boy, did you? And even if you did have something to fear, you've got your lower second, you're on your way to the Bar. You're _well_ out of the woods.'

Thor would never be out of the woods: the beasts of Loki's masochism would rear up again, and when they did, Thor wouldn't get so much as a whiff of a Virgil, much less an all-expenses-paid cruise through hell and out the other side. Satisfied in this, Loki crossed his legs and drained his glass, and beckoned forth a waiter so that he could order the next round. Wyndham and Thor took whisky; Nick, liking to do the done thing, followed suit. When Loki asked for a Hanky-Panky, he was proud to feel that he was being in some way disobedient.

'In fact,' Loki continued, lighting another cigarette, 'Parsons is out of the woods, too; he's doing something in the City, where they like their boys behaving badly. What happened to him at school might have come as a commendation. Who knows, maybe there's a place for me there yet.'

'That's overstating it,' Nick said. He had not quite got past the remark about the Other Ranks. 'If it was commendable, it was just as much of a liability. The trick with them is to make it impossible to be held accountable for having behaved badly. If there _were_ a place for you, you would have the advantage in that regard: the score with Parsons would be two to zero.'

'Parsons has done well for himself, considering,' Thor said. With a different inflection, this might have seemed a defense of Loki. As it was, the sentence was generally understood to have concluded with 'unlike certain others here tonight'.

Wyndham, meanwhile, put forward a defense in the guise of a swerve of topic. 'Loki,' he said (Loki wondered whether the name had been used out of a sudden intimacy or a need to differentiate between the Odinsons), 'you're starting your year abroad next term, aren't you? I forgot you won't be going up with the rest of us.'

'I won't hear the end of it till he goes.' Nick had become, after a Manhattan, a flute of champagne, two glasses of Malbec, a glass of port and one and a half whiskies, fairly drunk. 'He won't stop telling me how naughty he'll be, he must think we won't have fun without him. I think I will.'

Laughing into his glass, drawing it away from his mouth and replacing it with his cigarette, Loki said, 'Yes, he's bitching now, but over Christmas I'll have him at our father's place in Nice. I wonder how much fault he'll find with me then. Of course he's finding fault with me now, and he's dining at my expense.'

It increased Loki's amusement to see Nick draining the last of his whisky and rising from the divan, jostling Wyndham's shoulder as he went. Once on his feet, the full force of his drunkenness seemed to knock into him from behind; his knees bent slightly, and in an abortive gesture he reached out as if to steady himself. He must have been gasping for a line: he had that bright-eyed look, that sense of an imminent descent into a state somewhat similar to rabies. 

'If that's how you feel about it, I won't cause you any more trouble,' Nick said. 'I'm not so enthusiastic about Nice as all that. Anyway'—he turned to address the others—'I expect Loki would be too ashamed of me to let me out on the _plage_. I'm not quite the Narcissus.'

There was a slight slackening of Thor's face, a stiffening of the shoulders, and Loki knew that neither Wyndham nor Nick had bothered to tell Thor about the relationship. Though Loki felt some pleasure at seeing Thor's cogitation slamming to a neck-cracking stop, it was moderated by frustration that he hadn't been the one to let it slip. Loki was reminded of how many people had interfered with Thor in his absence.

'I wouldn't be,' Thor said. He clarified: '—Enthusiastic. I've been trying to beg my way out of holidays since I was thirteen.'

'My God, you'd think growing up with me would have taught you how to lie even modestly.' Loki shot a plume of smoke towards Thor. 'You couldn't get enough of it. When we were in school you would moan all year long about how you couldn't bear England, you wanted sun and the salt breeze. You cried about how you would put up with the mistral to get it—isn't that telling.'

'I'm going to find a cab,' Nick said. 'Thank you for the dinner, Loki, I'm very much indebted.'

Languidly, Loki said, 'Yes, you can repay me in the usual way.'

At once he felt how unsubtle he had been. The others wouldn't look at him, or looked at him hard. Nick seemed too drunk to feel it fully, too deep within himself. He looked at Loki sidelong, souring with the seconds, coming slowly round to murderousness. Loki wished Nick would crush his skull, would bite his teeth out; it would be a triumph, or at least an anecdote for the diaries of the other members of the club. In this state, feeling as though he hovered over the chair in which he was sitting, it pleased Loki to anticipate blood.

He added, 'At least I don't charge interest.'

'All right,' Thor said, rising, touching Nick on the elbow as he passed by, 'that's enough. Come with me, Grant, I'll take you to the concierge. He'll order a car for you.'

'Oh, very Aul Prae of you,' Loki called after Thor. Turning to Wyndham, who was draped drunkenly over one end of the divan, he said, 'He _was_ Aul Prae—I imagine you know already, he does like to guide the conversation round to it. Said to be the best since Harry Mountjoy in '88, though how the other boys knew what it had been like in '88 I couldn't say. They did think Thor was better-looking, and there were photographs for that.'

Thor and Nick had gone out of view. Loki looked through the thinning crowd; everyone was sucking absently on their cigarettes, sweating into their jackets and wiping their faces with their sleeves. The windows had been open for so long that the summer had got in.

'Don't you think that was a bit much?' The offence Wyndham seemed to want to express was adulterated by his yawn, which he tried to stifle. He had the sleepy, clumsy manner Loki associated with satisfaction: perhaps there had been something of that sort.

'He likes to be reminded of it. He wouldn't pass up a chance to show off. … Sixth form was his zenith, he was like one of the better emperors; really I don't think he's yet found out that he ought to have left some room for improvement.'

'You know what I meant,' Wyndham said. 'Is it some sort of sex thing? I mean, your actually _saying_ it…. Is he like the chap with the ruler, insert insult for ruler? Apparently you do a line in that type.'

'No...I don't think he likes it at all.'

'So it's common cruelty?'

'Cruelty of the common, by the common, for the common….' 

Tipping his head back so that the base of his skull rested against the plush of the chair, Loki saw, as if it were within reach, the ornate plasterwork above. An oval at the centre of the ceiling, banded by a vine-scroll that at intervals along its perimeter shot out floral sprays, contained a succession of varying shapes, diamond and circle and square, each narrowing down to a neoclassical scene done in oil. The picture appeared to portray Athena giving a tourist directions to some landmark that stood just out of view. In very literal terms, the goddess was pointing, somewhat inhospitably, towards the double doors that opened onto the hall. The doors were shut. Loki closed his eyes against the electric chandeliers and thought how total was the wreckage, how utterly collapsed the night, his summer, his youth. The chatterers at the bar, the lovers at the small tables— _commend all summer long_ , he thought, _whatever is begotten, born, and dies_. The man at the piano was growing tired, he was slurring his chords, but the songs were pretty as any; the music was for those who stayed, who were lonely or tenderly engaged. Loki was neither; he was finished, and felt he'd like to rest.

 

* * *

 

In the lavatory the piano was just audible. It thrummed through the structure of the building; it seemed to come from nowhere, and absorbed the noise of conversation. Loki's ears were ringing. Though he had come up to have a piss, he was dizzy and distracted, and took the usual route into the stall without thinking. He noticed only after he'd turned the lock and flipped down the seat-cover, exposing a surface on which lines might be cut. That was what one got when one left things up to the body. Now that he was here, however, he thought he might as well.

The noises of door and footsteps intervened between the gasping ripples of pleasure. This one hadn't even stopped by the urinal before going to the sink, Loki thought, leaning back against the wooden door of the stall. He envisioned an anonymous suit-back in front of the mirror; a blur of a reflection above a white collar and blue tie. The tap squeaked; water ran into the basin, gurgled down the drain. Loki's skull knocked against the wood. He mouthed: _Oh God, oh, oh_. For a moment, until the high wore down to a fluid stupidity, he believed that he would never go mad again.

Then he lifted himself up and gave the toilet a convincing flush. When he opened the door to the stall, he saw that the man at the sink hadn't gone, and that Thor was the man at the sink. His face was dripping, his hair pushed back; beneath his sunburnt, freckled skin there was the flush of practised drunkenness.

'No points for finding me here,' Loki said. 'I couldn't have been anywhere else.'

Thor, turning off the tap, said, 'I wasn't looking for you. For that matter neither is your ex-boyfriend.'

'Mm, but he can't be an ex-something if he wasn't a something in the first place. Do you call Jane your girlfriend…?' He gave a disbelieving gurgle of a laugh.

'Do you not see what you've done?'

'Given another boy reason to talk badly about me at every party he goes to from now until I've taken an overdose, or succumbed to an AIDS-related illness, and he resolves not to spit on my grave? I always do see what I'm doing, Thor, it's only that you can't imagine anyone seeing what you don't.'

They had danced so often in such circles of contempt that they did so now without thinking. The exchange was carried out with the bored grace of well-trained dancers who floated through another _Swan Lake_. Thor dried his hands with a few swipes of a towel; Loki stood with his hip against the counter, hand braced beside, looking at Thor but occasionally catching their reflections in his periphery. The awareness that he had perhaps taken too much was coming over him: his eyelids drooped, the lights above him flickered, he was cast into and then dragged out of darkness. Still his mouth moved.

'If you were worried about the house in Nice,' he went on, 'I wasn't ever going to take him.'

'Yes, I know, you thought mentioning it would make me livid. I'm not—I'm tired. I suppose that satisfies you in its own way.'

'I'm not satisfied. I rarely am...I'm a frightful hedonist, I mean I'm frightful at—'

'Would you stop,' Thor said. 'You don't have anything worth saying when you're like this.' 

'Which puts me a notch above you, you—'

'Haven't anything worth saying at all, yes, that's true as well.'

Turning with a sort of courtly flourish towards the sink, running the taps for himself, Loki said, 'This is my club. You must have known when Wyndham asked you that there was a chance you would see me here.'

'I won't duck out of the way every time there's the possibility of you being near. This is too small of a country for that.'

'You ducked well out of the way of that message I left you.' 

'How many times have I heard one of those messages and rung you back and listened to you tell me that you were— That you were in Bethnal Green shooting up with a boy who'd got pus leaking out of the holes in his thighs, that you'd woken up somewhere in Marseilles with a head wound and no passport— Do you _remember_ any of this? Do you remember whether it made you better to tell me I was the one who had done it to you?'

'It doesn't matter if it made me better: you had done it. You're still doing it.'

'There is nothing,' Thor said, leaning forward, reaching out as if to take Loki by the shoulders and knock him backwards, 'that I haven't done—to make you—'

Loki turned towards Thor. He had meant it to be a violent gesture, but found that he was slow, as if he were forcibly choreographed. In a snarling slur, he said, 'To make me what…pliable, willing, open-mouthed, open-thighed? …To make me say "I adore you, thank you, I'll do any—" '

'To make you happy—'

'Was that what that was?'

'It was all I'd got. I don't have anything else now, I'm sorry.'

'I don't believe you.' But Loki had forgotten what it was he didn't believe. The lights were dimming; he saw the Royal Opera House, the red and gold, the rustling gleam of the dress circle. It was the interval now, he was moving down a carpeted staircase, into the champagne bar. Wyndham, in black tie, was looking him up and down, as if there were something wrong with him. There was—he was in a dinner jacket lightly dusted by cigarette ash. He had sweated through the armpits. He tried, uncertain that his lips were moving, to say, _It's just that I was coming from my club, I was having drinks with…mm, weren't you there? My brother was, and the funny thing is_ …

Then Thor's image peeled through that of Wyndham; the black-and-white tile of the lavatory pushed through the carpet of the champagne bar. Loki reminded himself that he was awake. He looked up at Thor (who stood, whereas he was leaning against the counter again, half-slumping) and saw that Thor pitied him.

'I'll take you home,' Thor said.

'No, I don't want to go there.'

'I mean your flat.'

'Why didn't you say so.'

'I'll take you to your flat,' Thor clarified.

'I'm going to vomit,' Loki said, and swivelled round to the sink just in time. He was less distressed than he might have been. That was more or less what they did in Purgatory, and there it was a movement upwards. Much lighter, he splashed water on his mouth and hands, wetting a good portion of his shirtfront in the process. He pushed himself into standing position. 'Thank you, that was dignified, wasn't it. …God, how vile, get that out of there.' He had noticed that in the sink, well-masticated pieces of roast lamb stood in a sort of consommé of gin fizz.

Thor said, 'They'll give you a glass of water downstairs.'

If Loki did have a glass of water, the memory joined the chorus of forgotten things that shifted through the shadows of the crisp, implacable recollections he always happened to retain. He remembered the pull of the doorman's gloves across his stubby hands, the chunks of crumbling pavement kicked down into the gutter, the silhouettes of a couple crossing the street in front of the car that stood waiting. As the couple passed in front of the headlamps, lines of white light marked them out, and all other features were flattened into a total blackness. The two seemed to hang suspended, each with one leg lifted in front of the other, shoulders hunched in an unconscious gesture of defense against the light.

In the car, Loki tried to smoke a cigarette. Thor took the packet and lighter from him, saying, 'You can smoke as much as you'd like when...' His voice faded out. Like a child, knowing nothing of what surrounded him, Loki ached.

For a long time they skated along the edge of Green Park, which in the night was featureless. Globes of orange lamplight smeared past; a figure or a clump of figures was now and then uncovered. In the darkness between these flashes of vision, the car was transmuted: the colors changed, the dimensions shifted, and Loki found he was nineteen again, his hands on the steering wheel, tapping. He was labile and only a little spoilt. He was also singing. He shot into the tunnel beneath Wellington Arch and felt himself sliding off into an unquantifiable quickness: he had spent a good deal of time indulging his body, and did not know how to think of the motion as anything but that of release. He was going, he was going…. Later, insensible to whatever it was that had drawn blood, he climbed out of the car and walked onward, laboring under the delusion that his going was inviolable.

'Loki,' Thor said.

There was a faint pressure against Loki's shoulder. Loki took some time to identify it as the pressure of a hand. One car door stood open, the cool conditioned air was dissipating. Sweat had pasted Loki's shirt to his back. He rolled his head round to look at Thor, who was hovering in front of Loki's face like a vision. Beyond him, Loki recognized his own front step.

'Hand over your latchkey,' Thor demanded.

' _Fuck_ off.' This was said with such genuine antipathy that Loki was remotely surprised at himself, though Thor wasn't. 'Knock down the door if you like…or leave me on the kerb, I don't care.'

Thor put his hand beneath the lapel of Loki's jacket and felt for the inner breast pocket where he always kept his keys. The sensation of Thor's hand against Loki's chest, altered but not lessened by the intervening fabric, incited a slow, insidious greed. When Thor found the latchkey and began to draw away, Loki took hold of his wrist, stilling his hand where it lay.

'Give,' Thor said.

'If you let me into my flat,' Loki said, 'and I locked myself in the bathroom and ran the taps and then took an overdose…would you sit on the sofa and flip through a magazine until you were fairly certain I was dead, then burst through the door and pretend you had found me too late? …Or would you burst through the door straightaway, and regret it every time you got another filthy message?'

'Let go of my hand,' Thor said, 'we're nearly there. If you turn me loose I'll get your cigarettes out for you.'

In an impudent, childish gesture, Loki pulled Thor's hand up to his face. He rubbed his nose along the knobbly line of Thor's knuckles, twitching at the tickle of the tufts of hair, then kissed the back of his hand. The skin was worn; it was like the hand of a labourer. _Whose pick-axe_ , Loki thought, _smooths the road before my chariot_ …. With this as a rhythm, he kissed the tips of Thor's fingers, and brought them into his mouth.

 

* * *

 

iii. 

' _Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux_ ,' Loki recited, falling back onto the half-upturned duvet, reaching his long arms out to grasp Thor's shoulders, wrinkle Thor's shirt. If he were the king of a rainy country, he ought to have had more power: the dawn was bringing up the deep blue of a downpour. ' _Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux_ … Qui, de ses copains méprisant les pipes—aha ha ha—s'ennui avec son frère comme avec d'autres bêtes.'

Thor had once tried to learn enough of languages, both modern and ancient, to keep up with Loki, who abused any advantage he possessed. Since then he had learned to inhabit his physical strength, to rely on those qualities which were unwavering even in the face of conflict: so he hauled Loki up by the hips and put him over his lap, restoring him to the position he had occupied ten minutes before.

'All right,' Thor said. He sounded to Loki like one of the night nurses at the Priory, listening to his complaints before giving him a glass of water and benzodiazepines and telling him to go back to bed. 'You're very clever.'

With his forehead pressed against the duvet, his face in a hollow of linen and goose-down, Loki said, '"Shut up," I know. Tell me…. Say it yourself.'

'No,' Thor said, and brought his palm down against Loki's bare arse.

Loki groaned. He recoiled at the pain, bright and flat, and the resultant wash of numbness. He said, 'You're not hurting me.'

Thor did it again, and hurt Loki just the same as he had done before. To stop Loki from complaining, he did it once more, harder, dragging Loki's soft front—cock and stomach and upper thighs—along the fabric of Thor's trousers. Loki was halfway to coming. He felt it less as incipient gratification and more as a terror he'd expected but failed to prepare for. He wanted to beg, _Not yet_.

Because then it would begin again: he would be four years into the past, robbed of all the comforts he had accrued in the meantime, sitting at his dealer's breakfast table and using his school tie as a tourniquet. The only difference would be that no one would believe, as they had then, that he was capable of reconstructing himself passably. Whatever was left of Loki lived in fragments of experience: dawn breaking into a bedsit in Shoreditch, vomit spattering down the steps in a tube station, a mobile ringing reproachfully into an empty room—like artefacts from a kingdom long burnt and buried. He couldn't paste them all together and say that he was himself again. He could only knot the tie and go shooting down the tunnel, towards the sort of extremity that would incinerate even the plaque that proclaimed, 'Look on my works, ye mighty'.

'Why don't you fuck me,' Loki murmured.

'Is that what you want?' Thor's hands were rubbing up and down the line of his thigh, in a motion that would have been soothing if it didn't chafe skin ravaged by collisions with a flat palm.

'It's only that I wonder why you don't. I should hardly think it matters now. ...Hit me again.'

'It doesn't matter,' Thor said, and hit Loki at the crease of his thighs, where it hurt most. 

Thor seemed, then, to take that last directive as the final one. He held Loki down by the scruff of the neck and laid into his naked body savagely, trying to give back all the pain it had caused him. He reduced Loki to gasps, to shouts; finally to whimpers, pitiful and undignified as someone in the throes of illness. Loki had the heat of a fever, the sweat and the wild white eyes. His hair was falling around his face, choking him.

'Is that enough?' Thor asked.

'No,' Loki said, and so Thor struck him until he cried, 'Sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry—'

'Are you?' 

'I'm sorry, I'm sorry—' 

Loki's voice was so hoarse, so hideous that Thor stopped. Thor pulled Loki up and lay him back against the mattress, wiping his hair away until his red, swollen face was visible, whereupon Loki rose into a sitting position and said, 'Is this a crisis of conscience?'

'I don't know why I'm doing this to you,' Thor said.

'Because you want to hear me say I'm sorry. I was saying it, I meant it…. Keep going. I'll be abroad starting next term, if you want to hear me grovel you'll have to take the Eurostar to do it.'

'I wouldn't, I don't want to hear you grovel.'

'Oh, you don't want to hear me grovel, you don't want to fuck me— You do, Thor, you want everything from me, you want to _do_ everything to me. You want to ruin me, yes, and you want to put me back together again, you want to thrash me till I'm weeping and then stroke my hair and tell me we're bound by blood, I'll always be your brother. You want to do all that and then go back to Kensington and kiss Mummy on the forehead and say you've done all you could for me but I simply don't want to get better. If getting better means cutting my hair and going to lectures and finding some Sloane whose skirt I can stick my hand up, why should I? Why should I be just like you? Why can't I have what I want and be done with it?'

'You told me four years ago,' Thor said, 'that that was all you wanted, that once you'd had it you'd be done.'

'Yes,' he said, falling back again as if in exhaustion, 'I lied, I've been lying. I'm always lying. I want this, I want this, I want our hell to be us sewn together. I want your cock down my throat, I want you to beat me bloody, I don't want you ever to touch me again.' 

Putting his knees between Loki's spread thighs, pulling Loki up by his shoulder and by his hair, Thor said, 'Be my brother again, and I'll do what you like.'

'All right,' Loki said, reaching down to clutch his cock, 'I'm your brother, make me come.' 

It was like walking down a familiar street and with a sickening jolt realizing that what he saw wasn't anything he had ever seen. The ordinary dropped away, and he staggered. He was unstable and uneasy as he was in dreams; he saw everything from odd angles. Thor's hair hanging down over his damp face, the crack in the wall zig-zagging towards the ceiling, the deep rainy sky slotting between the Venetian blinds. His own breath, pulsing in time with the pull of Thor's fist up his shaft, was like the noises he heard when he was manic and terrified, starting at flickers of false sensation. Still he knew instinctively that he had been here before—that he would be here again, in fact or in madness. He liked this too much, this giving in: it was all over now, it could not be taken back, he was falling. He was gasping, wailing a little, as the insides of his thighs chafed against Thor's hips. The heel of Thor's other hand dug into his waist. It was like—no, it was like having killed someone, it was like knowing how it felt to have killed himself.

'Oh, what are we doing,' Loki choked out, 'Thor—'

'Do you like this?' Thor asked, with real concern but without stilling his hand. Then, as if the question had been burning in him for ages and he had only just mustered the courage to ask it: 'Do you want this?'

Loki, coming, began to stiffen, then tremble. His head strained back, the long sweep of his neck was bared up to Thor; he clutched at Thor's shoulders, his neck, the curling ends of his hair, pulling Thor down to him. He felt his own muscles beneath his skin, he felt his own heart in his chest. He felt himself at the center of this, living, and Thor bending to kiss the side of his mouth.

Kneeling still between Loki's legs, Thor unfastened his trousers, took his cock in hand, and brought himself off. Was that also the same? All Loki remembered of that other summer was the sun in his eyes, the sun in Thor's hair, Thor's face a red shadow and his bare shoulders gleaming. The water lapping against the sides of the pool, the doves cooing in the eucalyptus. Lazy insects hissing, the hot wind rustling leaves. Of course there was Thor's semen on his stomach, and here it was again. In the close air of the bedroom it had a rich palpable scent. Loki smeared it on his fingers, then smeared his fingers down the front of Thor's half-unbuttoned shirt. Thor took the motion as a sort of beckoning: he slipped forward until his forehead rested against Loki's shoulder. That was more frightening than the kiss, perhaps because Thor did it despite having already come. Now there was nothing left for them but to care for each other as brothers.

By way of reply, Loki said only, 'Yes, it felt good.' He cupped the back of Thor's head, and felt how the noise and the tickle of Thor's breath expanded to fill that damp private space between his neck and shoulder. Gently beneath his palm Thor's skull moved in time with his lungs; veins pulsed beneath the fragile skin of the scalp. Loki felt the impulse to protect Thor, to keep those veins pulsing: not because he loved Thor, but because he wasn't done.

 

* * *

 

When their father bought Loki the flat, the summer before he went up to Oxford, it had the look of a luxurious sickroom, a quiet shady place where a lady of fashion might mend her nerves. The building was a mid-Victorian pile that had recently been converted: in the sitting room, kitchen fixtures extended along one wall, and the bow windows, which must have once been hidden behind miles of velvet, were unobtrusively muffled by white wooden shutters. Loki remembered stepping into the flat for the first time; it was late afternoon, when the sun fell against the front of the house and the hardwood shone between the gaps in the Afghan rugs. Now the hardwood and the Afghan rugs were painted over by a layer of detritus: dirty clothes and garment covers, shopping bags and carrier bags, mugs of coffee, packets of cigarettes, foil wrappers. A martini glass lay shattered in the narrow corridor, its bits strewn from the sitting room to the door at the end. Loki had scars on the soles of his feet from stepping on the shards.

The long mirror in the bedroom, where Loki by turns examined and ignored himself, was fingerprint-smeared and fuzzy with dust, whereas the oval mirror above the ransacked dresser was covered in magazine clippings and Polaroids. Most of the Polaroids were fairly innocent—Loki and ex-friends in fancy dress or at picnics, portrayed in a state of elegant dishevelment which in no way betrayed the underlying reality of total interpersonal wreckage—but a handful depicted uncannily handsome men on their hands and knees, or with semen glistening on their upturned faces. There was one of Nick on Loki's bed, the bed Thor and Loki had just fucked in, sucking on Loki's fingers. Nick looked earnest and unpretending, a young man with a young boy's sensitivity, offering up an expression of desire that struck no false note. It was this photo that Thor, standing before the dresser, seemed to be regarding. 

From where he lay on the bed, Loki called out, 'Are you worried it was better with Nick?'

'I was thinking what a shame it is that you treated him so badly.' Thor didn't turn to look at Loki. He pulled up the bottom of a page ripped out from an art magazine, exposing the top of Nick's head. 

'He'll be back in Berkshire by now, you could easily find him. How many people are there in Berkshire, two hundred?'

Turning at last, Thor said, 'Was this the way you talked with him—never saying anything you mean?'

'That's the way everyone talks. Everyone with sense; there are some who speak their mind, but then they make all the others uncomfortable, and they've got either to stop or to risk being socially trampled. I mean, think of the people who contribute to Comment is free.'

'Telling him that he could _repay you in the usual way_ was speaking your mind pretty straightforwardly.'

'No, there the joke was in pretending to be so tight I always insist on being repaid. It's just that you've got an unsubtle mind. You think everyone else is honest because you are. You only know about me because we've happened to spend about two decades together, and because I let you in on the truth.'

Thor absently flicked the photo of Nick. He said, 'Do you still have the camera?'

The camera was a Sun 600 Loki had liberated from the possession of a hemp-and-sage girl he had had the misfortune of going on holiday with, and despite its recent defilement, it retained its association with stucco and olive trees. Though it had been kicked halfway underneath the bed, along with clusters of dirty pants and water bottles with fag ends stuffed in, Loki was able to find it on the basis of its not belonging. It was like Nick's favorite lambswool jumper, or the early edition of _The Cocktail Party_ that had belonged to a boy in one of Loki's first-year tutorials. By virtue of having been more or less stolen, these objects resisted integration: Loki took notice of what he didn't own. Once his greed had been satisfied, even things long coveted were stepped on, thrown and broken. Then he mourned their loss; nonetheless he went on stepping, throwing, breaking.

'Pose. —Thor, pose.' Loki held the viewfinder to his eye. The room was narrowed, bounded in, like a postage stamp. The mess melted into vague shadowy forms, and Thor was reduced to spots of color. He wouldn't pose. 'Think about—'

'What?' Thor asked, after the flash burst and the shutter clicked. 'Think about what?'

'Nothing,' Loki said. 'I couldn't think of anything, so I took the photo. What _did_ you think about?'

'Nothing…I was looking at you.'

In the photo, Thor's head and shoulders were circled by the pictures pasted onto the mirror. Reflected light shot out from the gaps between the pictures, cutting occasionally into the crisp boundaries of the figure. The disorder of the dresser confused the lines of Thor's hips and legs, but the upper half was good. Thor had stood very still. He had the look of a statue that had been carved to create the impression that the subject had just been interrupted. 

Thor held out his hands and said, 'Give it here,' so Loki tossed the camera over and surrendered himself, in turn, to being made an image. It was violent, photography—quick as a guillotine, whereas if you sat for a portrait, you had time at least to reflect on its effects. Loki had passed more than a handful of afternoons lying in someone else's bed, letting that person mould him into something like a David Hockney nude. _Loki. Florence._ ; _Loki. Copenhagen._ ; _Loki. Santorini_. Loki allowed it because it showed him how and why he was adored. What, then, he wondered, did this photograph show him? He looked more tired than he had anticipated. His face, though well-modelled, had the tight, swollen look often seen in mugshots of people who had committed murder and then regretted it. His limbs were grotesquely thin. The picture seemed less to adore than to bear witness to some morbid secret.

'It's really hideous,' Loki said, laughing.

It seemed as if he had wandered down the corridors or up the staircases of a labyrinthine hotel, and in some dim passage, came at a mirror from an odd angle. He caught sight of a figure, he recoiled from it, and only slowly understood that he had seen himself. But the very fact of his failure to recognize the figure seemed to indicate that he had not seen himself, that he had not been himself: that it was himself in the mirror, and a stranger watching. In the moment he felt nothing; the crash, in usual form, came afterwards. 

'Why don't you keep it?' Stretching, sighing, Thor settled into bed again. 'In a few years' time you might want to remember what you looked like.'

'Why would I? People have lived for thousands of years without seeing themselves anywhere but in still water. And that in itself caused trouble. Even if Nick were a Narcissus—well he's right to say he isn't—I wouldn't let him out; he'd drown.'

'You did, didn't you… Talk like this to him. You must have been driving him mad.'

'Yes, they call that levelling the playing field. Or taking an eye for an eye.'

Loki had thrown his forearm over his face. Hearing the scrabble of a hand on the nightstand, then the click of a lighter, he flung his arm away again. Thor, he saw, was leaning back against the headboard and lighting one of Loki's cigarettes. His back bent forward, his shoulders turned in; he looked just like he'd done when sneaking a cigarette in the garden of the Kensington house. In summer he would hide behind the lilac bush, so that the smoke mixed with the fragrance. One of Loki's most total memories was of smoking with Thor one evening in May, at that particular twilight hour when the sky is blue but everything else is in darkness. The garden and the surrounding houses seemed, in the low light, to be one long black shape of no particular density or depth; the glow of the cigarettes indicated two sweaty faces, leaves and lilac blossoms. The mosquitoes were invisible, but Loki felt their bites swelling on his arms and legs, and between his fingers. The funny thing was, he thought, remembering, he had been so viciously unhappy. Thor had just received his conditional acceptance to Trinity. At dinner that evening Loki had thrown a plate down the length of the dining table. Now, as he watched Thor tap out his cigarette in an empty glass on his bedside table, a vile, syphilitic regret pulsed in him. It turned his stomach, it numbed his tongue; it made him vastly aware that, far from being able to step again into the garden, he could not do anything but get out of bed and go to open the window.

 

* * *

 

The window stood open, letting in the rain, long after the cigarette was put out. Citing the heat, Thor had taken refuge in the shower; Loki remained in bed, on his back on top of the sweat-damp duvet, trying to smoke the rest of the packet so that he could send Thor down to the Tesco to buy more. When he heard Thor's mobile buzz, he thought at first that the sound must have been his skull rattling. The screen lit up, glowing through the duvet, but chain-smoking made him see flashes of light, too. Loki was almost unwilling to think of his own perception as influenced by physical fact, rather than wild internal unreality. He had somehow forgotten the terror of psychosis, and remembered it now as though it was some rare comfort he hoped someday to repossess. If he shut his eyes, he felt like he was pitching forward, into space….

_Are you all right?_ Jane's message said. _And are we still doing dinner tonight? It's okay if not. Let me know if you need help with him_

_Or with anything_ , she had added. 

The bed was against the wall that intervened between the bedroom and the bathroom. Loki could hear, beneath the falling water, the faint thuds of Thor shifting his weight from foot to foot, taking a step forward to reach the shampoo or to adjust the temperature. The rhythm of the water changed minutely as he moved. There was an unsurpassable intimacy, Loki thought, in listening to the effects of someone else's body. He had shared a room with Thor for so long that he had cultivated a sensibility to Thor's noises—the private sighs, the drunken snoring, the snapping of his joints as he stretched upon waking—and could use them to feel out the contours of Thor's living.

Loki entered Thor's passcode and typed, _No help needed at the moment, thank you darling_

_He's as well as can be hoped_

_Still dinner yes_

When it buzzed again, Thor's mobile was on Loki's stomach, rising and falling with his breath. Loki's hands were folded on top of it, keeping it steady. _Good_ , he imagined the message said, _I'm glad_. Perhaps _I've needed you_ ; there was always an element of need in Thor's relationships, an unwilling, even unconscious helplessness that seemed to emerge as a counterweight to Thor's insensible will. Loki had a masochistic craving for that sort of docility, then an answering revulsion towards himself. There was vomit crawling up his throat, that usual augur of the downward arc. Somewhere unreal, morning birds were chittering.

Loki dialled the number of a minicab company. 'Hello, yes,' he said, 'I'd like to order a car…to Fourteen Estlin Place, Kensington…that's SW7…about an hour.'

_Leaving for Estlin pl now_ , he wrote Jane. _Loki will be alright_

By the time that Thor returned, his mobile was buried somewhere in the duvet, and Loki was hunched over a large hardcover book of Viennese secessionist art, railing his last bit of blow. Thor, in a white vest and with a damp towel over his damp shoulders, came bearing a cloud of fragrance so tart and prepossessing that Loki retched. He had no awe left, he found, for Thor's body: Thor had pale legs and hangover stubble and an odor that persisted even beneath the scent of soap. Loki had expected to be appallingly sorry that Thor was going, and was met instead with a shuddering, climactic relief. He let his eyes fall closed, his head tip back; he assumed the pose of the supplicant, and refused to break it even as Thor leant down to cup his jaw.

'All that about being sorry,' Thor said quietly. Though Loki's eyes were closed, he sensed, perhaps wrongly, that Thor was laughing.

 

* * *

 

A blaze of tail-lights lit St James's Street from Pall Mall to Piccadilly; this hellish red glare was bounded in by the buildings on either side, gaunt Victorian and Georgian artefacts that in the twilight were not more than shadows. In the narrow strip of sky directly above the street, the last light could be seen clinging fiercely to its holds. It was the end of the day, the end of summer: a little fin-de-siècle, in the sense that orgasm was a little death. From the driver's seat of Wyndham's older brother's Aston Martin convertible, Loki watched the people on the pavement slinking towards languid dinners. They were clouded over by a season's worth of exhaust, mingling now with the smoke of two cigarettes. Still Loki could make out the slope of a familiar neck, the clasp of a familiar hand at the back of a Topshop minidress. There was, in the gesture, a faint sense of noblesse oblige.

'Oh, God, they can't see us?' Wyndham asked, mumbling around his cigarette.

The couple, Loki saw, were turning towards the entrance of an irredeemably trendy restaurant. They seemed to have fallen into companionable silence; every now and then they looked towards each other, lingering.

'They will,' Loki said. 'Just a second. Here.' 

Keeping his cigarette between his lips for safekeeping, he slammed the heel of his hand down on the horn, so that Thor and Jane jolted towards his direction. He would have waved, but the light up ahead had turned green, and the traffic was drifting slowly northward again. As the convertible gained speed, the still summer air was shunted into a sort of breeze, threading through Loki's hair, wiping away the sweat on his brow. On either side of him the tail-lights, the tired passerby, swept down the street as surely as if he were pulling them into his own indefatigable motion.


End file.
